Alernative to putting Steam games on SDD?

I've got a 160Gb SSD that is filling up pretty fast thanks to recent Steam Deals, what I'm wondering is if games can be saved onto an external HDD and played on my laptop from that? Are there any other alternatives?

Note- I wasn't sure if this belonged in gaming, hardware, or software subforums, so feel free to move it.

 

NTFS symbolic link - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

you want the /j

okay since you're gonna ask:
run this in cmd


"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\GAMENAME" mklink /j "D:\SteamApps\GAMENAME"

D is whatever your back is, C is your primary installation.

 

No need to get all fancy, you can just drag/dump your entire valve/steam folder to whatever drive you like, and change the steam program shortcut as appropriate. Steam will detect something changed and reinstall itself to where you specified. I put my steam folder on my 2nd HDD myself because yeah, the game files really do pile up.

You can use an external hdd too of course, but for your sake I hope that it is USB3, or at least eSATA, otherwise there can be noticeable lag spikes (as well as taking forever on load screens).

 

This method moves the entire thing.

I would keep a few games you play often with long loading times in the SSD and the rest in the external.

 

Why keep them installed? Just remove the ones you don't play often. You can always re-download them, and if you're paranoid or just have to pay per byte for bandwidth you can just back up your steamapps folder and copy the apps back over when you want to play them.

 

Yep. I bought the Seagate Momentus 750GB to put in an external enclosure mainly for that reason. Just copy the steamapps folder to an external drive, and copy the appropriate folder from / to your steamapps/common or username folder over, plus the same ncf and/or gcf file from your steamapps folder and you're good to go (usually).

 

Steam now has the handy backup feature, so you dont have to re-download them. It just makes a compressed file in the form of an .exe that you can execute to reinstall

 

i got a 1TB eSATA external and its really fast. I get 120-140MBps on the outer platter

EDIT My steam is 300 gigs with 80 or so games ^^

 

If you want to mess around with Junction Points & Symbolic Links here is a handy tool to avoid messing with the command prompt.

Junction Link Magic

Wingnuts got so many Steam games they actually pay him a monthly fee to act as a secondary Steam server just in case the primary mainframe fails.

How else do you think he has like 50 steam games to give away for his X-Mas contest?

 

Wingnut's clearly santa in disguise and is recruiting little elf helpers from NBR. He just indirectly recruits them by bribing them steam games

 

lol...he is such a nice man!....if i made more money i would have done that too ^^

 

Naw, Gabe and I are just "buddies"... lol

 

I run Steam from an external USB 2.0 drive...

Currently, playing Borderlands and I don't find any lag (of course, Borderlands isn't a precision shooter) and load times aren't that bad (of course, I've never experienced the nirvana of an SSD)...at least, I don't find the load times annoying...

There is a support thread on the Steam forums that details how to move your Steam installation to save having to re-download the games...not only does it work for moving Steam to an external HDD, but I also used it to move a large portion of my Steam games to my m11x (from the external HDD)...

I can only use my Steam account on one machine at a time, but it's nice to have my Steam library available on both machines (no external HDD for the m11x...anything external to the m11x kinda defeats the purpose of the compact m11x, in my opinion), and the 'cloud' allows me to move between both machines keeping my saves up-to-date...

 

So from the looks of things, Steam has caused an increase in external hard drive usage, lol.

I think I'll pick up a 320GB eSata external hard drive to use as my game storage device, while I'll keep my most played games on the SSD. Looks like I can pick up a cheap one for around 70 bucks.

I absolutely love my SSD, I just wish that the capacity is bigger. Of course, then I wonder how much more this laptop would have cost me with a 320Gb SSD..oh god.

 

If you don't use the optical drive much, then get a hard drive caddy so you can use a hard drive instead of the optical drive, and then put your DVD drive in an external enclosure.

 

I think the best option would be a standard 750GB HDD in your optical drive inside of a HDD caddy (as htwingnut suggested) using NTFS file compression along side your SSD which would be used to run your main Operating System only. After that you could install your optical drive into a cheap external USB case so you could still use it when ever required. This is what I have done apart from me having a hybrid drive instead of an SSD.

 

For as much as I use my optical drive this would be a better choice, I think. I think 750GB may be a little overkill for how much I actually have, unless the price is similar to the 500GB I found on newegg.

Newegg.com - SAMSUNG Spinpoint MP4 HM500JJ 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Seems a good deal to me, but it's been ages since I bought a hard drive. I would need to buy a caddy to hold this and then place in the optical drive slot, correct?

 

I would personally go for the WD Scorpio Black 500GB, same price. Out of stock at the moment but they get them in quickly.

Newegg.com - Western Digital Scorpio Black WD5000BEKT 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

 

Any particular reason? I've had bad experience with WD in the past, but that was years ago.

 

WD's over the last few years are the fastest, most reliable, and typically lowest power useage HDD's. At least personally I've used them 90% in my machines and recommended to friends and family and all have been happy. Also look at the user reviews at various sites and they're very highly rated.